(en) Britain, SolFed* - We all need to be active in the fight against rape culture

Date
Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:29:59 +0200

Early morning, 29th December, a 23 year old woman died in a hospital in Singapore
surrounded by her family. 13 days earlier she had been brutally gang raped by six men
whilst travelling on a bus in Delhi with a male friend. The attack caused irreparable
damage to her vital organs and has triggered outrage across the world. ---- Since the
attack on 16th December, protests have erupted in Delhi and other cities in India such as
Mumbai and Calcutta. Women, men and children have joined together, furious at the police
and government constantly turning a blind eye to attacks and a systematic bias towards
rapists and abusers. Evidence of the police's complete inability to handle cases of rape
came last Wednesday, when, devastatingly, a 17 year old girl committed suicide after
police in the Patiala region of the Punjab tried to get her to drop rape charges and marry
one of her attackers.

Violence remains a problem for women in India; of 256,329 violent crimes recorded in India
last year, 228,650 were towards women. This doesn't take into account all the women who
felt too afraid of victim blaming and repercussions to report.

The majority of the protests in India have focused on both the attitude of the authorities
and also the cultural attitude to rape and violence towards women. Placards have called
for people to allow their daughters to go out and to educate their sons on sexual
violence, others for rapists and attackers to be killed. Police have attempted to crack
down on protests, closing metro stations, banning gatherings of more than 5 people in
Delhi and using water cannons, batons and tear gases against the protestors, but people
are still demonstrating, pulling down barricades that the police have erected to keep
crowds back. The authorities are afraid that the death of the woman in Singapore will only
cause more public anger.

It is clear that there is a deeply ingrained problem in India, but Rape Culture is not an
Indian problem, it is a global problem. It is dangerous and insulting to women to say it
is a problem "over there" and not something we have to worry about here. There is a reason
that in the UK, around 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped each year
and there is a reason that the conviction rate in the UK is only roughly 6%: women are
scared to report, women are blamed and accused of lying when they do choose to tell people
about their assault and as a society we find it easier to look away from abuse and rape
rather than tackle the problem head on.